Paleomagnetic correlation of Miocene pyroclastics of the Bükk Mts and their forelands

Abstract

Abstract Paleomagnetic measurements were carried out on 163 independently oriented samples from 19 sites of the Bukk Mts and their northern, western and southern forelands. The aim was to correlate the sites with one of three Miocene rhyolite tuff horizons using the combination of paleomagnetic marker horizons (rotational events) and traditional magnetostratigraphy. In contrast to the results of earlier studies in the southern Bukk foreland, which yielded only reversed polarity magnetizations, nearly half of the presently obtained paleomagnetic directions are of normal polarity. By their declinations they mostly belong to the middle tuff horizon, and only one belongs to the upper. The paleomagnetic age assignment of the studied sites sometimes supports one or both of the classifications of Balogh (1964) and Pelikan et al. (2005). However, about one-third of the sites classified by these authors as upper or lower tuffs were shown to belong to the middle tuff complex.